[TheForge] Adventures in steel delivery.

[Jerry Frost]

Glad nobody was hurt outside of the steel company's pocketbook.  Think 
they'll give you  a discount on future orders? Think they're looking for a 
couple new drivers?

Ries has it about right but be aware the conditions at your location will 
dictate specific soils stabilization requirements. Typar is one brand name 
of geotextile like Ries describes and probably the most popular in Alaska.

What's the gradation of the pit run available? You'll need different 
gradations depending on water table, FS soils depth and grade. If you have 
non-FS (Frost Susceptible) soil you're lucky. FS soil holds water so it 
expands and contracts when freezing/thawing. If it's sticky of flowing mud 
it's FS. Excavate below ground water by a couple feet and lay your 
Geotextile so it forms a trough and fill it to water table (ground water 
table that is) with bone rock, no fines. (I'll define fines shortly) This 
will form a zone where water can flow under and away from your driveway. 
Cover the bone rock layer with geotextile and fill in lifts less than 2' if 
you have a proper vibrating roller to compact it. If you're using a plate 
compactor fill in 6" lifts and compact thoroughly. (till compactor is 
bouncing) Do NOT use much water, the less possible the better. Too much 
water and it'll start replacing gravel in your lifts. A rule of thumb 
indicator of excess water is free water under the compactor. If water 
splashes out from under the plate it's too wet, if wet mud forms it's too 
wet. It should only be damp to be right. However if it's dusty or fines, 
sand or gravel vibrates loose, moves or just doesn't set up under the 
compactor add a LITTLE water.

Okay, so much for compacting as a general rule. Good gravel is composed of a 
gradation of sizes that fill the voids formed when particles lay together 
and do so uniformly. For instance, 4ea. 3" stones laying hard together have 
spaces everywhere BUT contact points. Fill these spaces with the largest 
stones that require three pieces to fill the space and repeat till the grain 
sizes pass a 200 screen, minus 200. -200 is on the small end of fines. -20 
is sand, 4 is pea gravel. Crushed -1" is D1.

Okay, what a proper gradation does is fill virtually every void to yield 
100% compaction and it is as hard a non-consolidated (stone) formatin as 
you're going to find. In practical terms 100% is a term used to define fill 
that has been compacted to it's practical limit or good enough for the 
structure it's going to support. Glacial till is about as close to the 
theoretical 100% as you're going to find though humans try. For instance 
most nuclear reactors sitting on uncnsolidated soils are on "over compacted" 
material done by dropping a 10+ton wrecking ball from a couple hundred feet 
repeatedly till it bounces on impact.

So, lay your bone rock drain rock leaving several feet till your reach OG 
(Original Grade) and fill in lifts till you reach to within about 6" of 
finish grade and fill the last 6" with D1 and crown IIRC 1/2" to 10' from 
the center of the road to the shoulder for drainage.

And so ends Doc. Frosty's road building tutorial as recalled from his dented 
haid.

I'll see if I can borrow the ASHTO manuals or maybe check the library if you 
have questions. There are field tests that will serve in place of lab tests, 
so long as you aren't building a public road. There are also ways to 
overdesign to make up for not doing proper testing.

Jer
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Andrew Vida" <osan at netlabs.net>
To: "Blacksmithing List Sponsored by ABANA" <theforge at mailman.qth.net>
Sent: Saturday, March 09, 2013 4:31 PM
Subject: Re: [TheForge] Adventures in steel delivery.


> Our short driveway is asphalt.  Adjuster came yesterday and said it will 
> all be covered, so we're good there.
>
> The longer driveway is about 700 feet.  I will put down typar (sp?) and do 
> the gravel with fines exactly for the reasons you state.  Have to regrade 
> first.  I'll get a bulldozer and fix it... shouldn't take very long.  I 
> used to grade my mile long driveway in about 5 hours.
>
> We just had the second very wet winter in a row and to be frank I am a 
> little tired of slogging around in the red shale goo.  I got so stuck in 
> it the day before yesterday I almost had to leave the boots where they 
> were.  Luckily I am too stubborn. :)
>
> On 3/8/2013 1:16 PM, Ries Niemi wrote:
>> Out here, we live on an old river delta, where a big enough rock will end 
>> up in china if you leave it where it is for a few years.
>> We use "road cloth", which is this ten or twelve foot wide black porous 
>> fabric, it lets water through. You pre-grade your driveway, then lay down 
>> the road cloth. Then, you dump something like 1 1/4" with fines- gravel 
>> with the grit still mixed in. After a winter, and a bit of driving on it, 
>> it hardens up into a pretty solid driveway. Sometimes we use "pit run", 
>> too- its smaller gravel, with more fines- it hardens up even better, but 
>> the smaller gravel is less resistant to being spun out by car tires.
>> Its a LOT cheaper than paving. Still costs money, though- I probably have 
>> 500 feet of it, with my various driveways- a fair amount of dump trucks 
>> full.
>>
>> ries
>>
>>
>> On Mar 8, 2013, at 9:59 AM, Andrew Vida wrote:
>>
>>> All covered.  Got us a rental car and adjusters should be out early next 
>>> week.  Other than repaving the entire driveway, I am not sure how they 
>>> will repair the damage there.
>>>
>>> On 3/8/2013 12:00 PM, CGRAF wrote:
>>>> I am hoping that the house is OK. The dirt can always be pushed back in
>>>> place.
>>>> Does the trucking company have insurance to cover any structural 
>>>> damage?
>>>>
>>>> Mike Graf